


Dancing in the Sunlight

by Sineala



Category: The Mark of the Horse Lord - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:05:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1725530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterwards, the Romans returned the bodies.</p>
<p>Murna supposed that she should be grateful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dancing in the Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carmarthen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/gifts).



Afterwards, the Romans returned the bodies.

Murna supposed that she should be grateful.

The men carried them back with the greatest ceremony -- first her mother, her body distended by water, battered by rocks, and then... she could not make herself say his name. In death, she wanted to name him rightly, and she did not know what it was, that she might say it. In death, he looked nearly peaceful, despite the blood on his face, half of a smile curling about his lips. His death, the men had said, had been glorious, falling like a swan in flight.

Tears welled up in her eyes and a sob choked her throat.

There was a very slight jingling of jewelry beside her, and she did not need to look up to know it was Conory.

"Did she--" she began, the words tearing her up inside like knives scraping hides. "Did he-- did he kill my mother?"

She did not know which to grieve for; she did not think she could grieve for both without it ripping her apart entirely.

Conory, she saw, had bitten his lip. He was looking away, and his words were careful. "Midir did."

It was not precisely what she had asked.

He had known, she realized, of course he had known, for if even she knew the man she had married was not Midir -- for he had been too kind -- it must have been as plain as day to the man who had grown up as Midir's friend, who had fought with him, shoulder-to-shoulder, who had bonded with him in the ways of men. He must have known from the very first moment.

Murna's hands made fists at her sides, clenching and unclenching. She drew herself up, as tall and regal as she could.

"And where is Midir?"

Conory swallowed hard, dared a smile, and lied to her face. "As you see him, my queen."

She struck him.

The slap was loud, ringing, and Conory's head twisted back with the blow. His face was red, she noted absently, red about his eyes; he had been crying. Whom had he cried for? Which one? Did it matter?

No one turned back to watch them. A queen's grief was her own.

"When," she asked, feeling the anger settle into her bones, into her eyes, mazing her vision with red, "were you going to tell me?"

Conory made a noise that could have been choking, crying, or laughter; she did not know which was more horrifying.

"Never," he said, very quietly, his voice hoarse, and his tongue flicked out to lick at his split lip, blood-red, bright with life. "It matters not. There are no secrets left to keep. Not to you."

"Midir," she prompted, and Conory shut his eyes.

"He and Liadhan fell from the seaward side of the fort," Conory murmured. "He threw them both over, the Romans said. Her body fell on the rocks. His washed out. Never came back. Better that way. We shall only have one king to bury, and no one else need know the truth. The Roman commander told only Gault, and Gault told only me. It goes no further."

They were all dead, then: her mother, and Midir and his double both. It should not have mattered, not him. She had hardly known Midir, after all. She had never loved Midir. She did not know if she had loved the other.

"Give me his name."

Conory looked at her for a long time. "Phaedrus," he said, and the word was no more than breath, no more than autumn winds dissolving into nothingness. "Red Phaedrus, a gladiator of Corstopitum."

"Phaedrus," she repeated, tilting her head coolly. "I will mourn him."

* * *

She went to the huts, not knowing who she had sought -- who she had meant to seek out, all along -- until she had found her.

Teleri looked up, one lock of dark hair curling into her face. "Murna?" she asked, hesitantly. "I thought you were-- I thought you would be with--"

Murna shook her head. She did not want to talk about it. She wanted to drive it all out of her head. "Teleri. Dance with me."

It was not quite a command; she was not certain she knew, these days, how to say something that entirely wasn't, but Teleri half-smiled, as if she had wanted to anyway, and she went to the kist for the weapons.

They were the only people on the dancing-ground. Teleri's hands were bright with metal, and she was still partway smiling as she pressed a dirk into each of Murna's hands. The grin turned fierce. She did not look at Murna as if she expected her to weep, to bend like a fragile poppy-flower, to break under the weight of her feelings. It was why Murna had wanted her.

"Dance, then," said Murna, and only now did Teleri hesitate, that fierce grin flickering briefly away.

"There is no piper."

She could feel the beat of it, the rush of blood through her body, the pounding of her heart, as if all the death had brought her to life and life again, twice as much as before, more than she could hold. She tapped the blades against each other, not quite in time with her heart, but in rhythm nonetheless.

"I call the time," she said, and she knew her voice now was an order. Her weapons still struck each other, ringing out in the silence. Tap. Tap. One, two, three four. "We dance to that."

Teleri nodded once, curtly, and then lunged forward in the first step, stabbing forward, her own hands just inside Murna's. Their wrists brushed, and she felt the contact, the spot of heat, like the touch of lightning. Teleri had always been thus. Untamed.

Murna laughed and dropped her own hands, weaving them down and up and back in, forcing Teleri's arms back down and out. The second step.

On the dance went, blades flashing in the light, faster and faster. Every move was in the right place, every time she swung out Teleri was just where she should be, to block her, to dance back, to push forward again. And in the middle of Murna's grief there was a sharp kind of joy, a keen knowledge that this was the closest she could come to standing on the ramparts.

She imagined the face of Midir -- of Phaedrus -- sunlit and smiling as he fell--

Then she stumbled, and something inside her was backwards and twisted, and she realized that she had been dancing Teleri's part, as Teleri forced her back and back, the dance whirling to its silent conclusion.

Murna dropped to her knees. The dirks fell from her hands. And then she was lying on her back staring into the clouded sky, with Teleri standing above her, hands raised in the victor's pose.

She waited for Teleri to laugh at her, to smile. To help her up. To do anything, anything at all.

Teleri knelt, her face cool and fierce, like the snarl of a hunting-hound.

"My queen," she said, and there was nothing of mockery in her words, no hidden lies, the way Conory had said it, the way Phaedrus had said it. This was simple. It was the way the men swore oaths to each other, the pledge of a warrior.

And then Teleri kissed her, quickly, her lips brushing first against Murna's forehead, then her surprised mouth. There was so much life in her, so much-- she couldn't think of the word--

Teleri grabbed the daggers, rose, and left.

_Truth_ , Murna thought, dumbstruck, touching her dusty hand to her own lips where Teleri had kissed her, feeling them tingle. _There was truth in that._ Her life had been lies long enough that she had forgotten how that felt.

Phaedrus would have wanted that for her.

And if she shut her eyes and cried now, where there were none to see her, that was her own business, for she was the queen of the Dalriadain. And if the queen of the Dalriadain bore a gladiator's son to remember him by -- that was also her business.

Teleri, she thought, would not mind. She could hear the truth of it.


End file.
